They have a song called "Nothing I Need," and it's a simple but complex song. From what I can infer, the singer is talking about losing someone he wishes he had kept in his life. He loses a girl and wishes for her back, wishes he'd known what he had, and yet the recurring chorus line is this: "I got everything I want and I got nothing that I need."
This phrase is something a lot of us feel regarding contentment and letting things go. The singer is lamenting his decision to let her go, yet continues to say this haunting phrase. He got what he wanted, but it wasn't what he needed. So, is it worth still wanting what you can't have?
As I sat in a small auditorium in Reno, listening to this musical group of geniuses creating music that took me out of my seat and into somewhere otherworldly, I thought about contentment and minimalism and wanting versus needing, and this is what I got from the song:
"I got everything I want." - This is where the key to happiness lies. There will always be missed opportunities and missed relationships. We aren't omniscient. We are free-will human beings doing the best we can with every choice we make (most of us, anyway), and that means we will choose wrongly despite our best attempts. We can't know where we'll go wrong, sometimes. This is where choosing contentment comes into play. Remind yourself how much you have, how much you have wanted, and also received, even though we all have things we want that we'll never have. Choosing to believe we have "everything we want" puts our whole life into the right perspective. One of gratitude.
Remember, but stop looking back - It's that looking back that will eat away at our heart and soul. We can't go back and change things; we can't go back and make that decision to go in the direction we wished we had gone. We can only work with what we now have. Looking back breaks the heart, and when the heart is broken, the only way to heal it is by moving forward. These two lines in the song are poignant: "I'd give up everything I've got just to have what used to be; You're the one I'll never get and you're the one thing that I need." I believe we all have a relationship (family or friends) we wish we could've had that never was to be. Instead of staying stuck in heartbreak, we have to stop looking back at what could've been and focus on what is. It hurts too much to stay in the "what if" gray area, and it does you no good.
"And I got nothing that I need" - This line gets to me the most. It tugs at the heart to say we never got what we really needed. But, there will always be something we think we "need," and yet, need is a broad category. What do we really need? To never "have to have" something or an item in your life to feel complete is ultimate freedom, even if it pertains to relationships. This is a tenet of minimalism that most people continue to work on throughout their lives. If I can just have that big house, that car, that vacation, that person. To be content with what God gives us is the goal ... even if it's difficult to get to that mindset and we don't know the reason behind our longing for a specific thing or "need."
Yes, there will always be a loss of some sort for everyone. We all want things we weren't meant to have. But if we can remember what we do have and hold, regardless of what it is, that's a way to circumvent the loss. And by reminding ourselves of everything we have, despite a broken heart, there is a way to move on and be the whole, complete, satisfied people we were meant to be.
I love this song for what it is. I relate to it fully. But it also reminds me that I can let go and move forward.
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